only want to congratulate you for keeping up with your mods for over 6 years with pressure for Forge ports and the massive bandwagon of individuals updating for the sake of updating and playing only the highest version of the game for the sake of "content". You don't get much deserved recognition or ever will be in the spotlight because of those choices, the same choices that make your mods outclass most mods out there (save of Optifine). That said I will personally track you down if any of your mods disappear from the face of the earth and ask for a copy of your work so far.

I have been running using your mods for the past years in both multi and single player and never had so much bang for my buck in terms of performance to content ratio. I wish there were other modders like you around and focus on the gameplay experience rather then pump out code to make their mods playable in each 6 month update at the cost of content. You really don't get enough recognition of what you achieved so far.

I hope I see more content from you some more on both 1.6.4 and some 1.7 and pat yourself on the back for providing a better, authenthic and truer to its ideals vanilla experience than any other existing version of minecraft.

Anyway, I am not a cheerleader and I don't do flattery, I am just pointing out the facts here.

Edit: Twitch lost my account so I had to create this just to post this.

I've just tried the TMCWv4 mod and, wow, I'm very impressed... You have boosted my nostalgia for the old pre-1.7 terrain generation to a whole new level... I didn't remember how good-looking beaches and swamps used to be... Cave generation is just outstanding... And all the new biomes... I like the Rocky Mountains biome a lot.

Just a question... Is it possible to generate a world with your mod and then open it with a newer Minecraft version without messing up all the world?

I've just tried the TMCWv4 mod and, wow, I'm very impressed... You have boosted my nostalgia for the old pre-1.7 terrain generation to a whole new level... I didn't remember how good-looking beaches and swamps used to be... Cave generation is just outstanding... And all the new biomes... I like the Rocky Mountains biome a lot.

Just a question... Is it possible to generate a world with your mod and then open it with a newer Minecraft version without messing up all the world?

If you mean release 1.7, the beaches in this mod are not representative of beaches in older versions - or rather, since Beta 1.7.3, when beaches were generated in an entirely different manner (instead of using biomes the game used, I believe, a height map to determine what should be sand, and the altitude was limited to several blocks above sea level; by contrast, I changed the height smoothing the game uses between biomes so it doesn't have much influence on the height of beaches, as well as rivers); for example, here is a rendering from when I modded a copy of my first world with TMCW; you can see where beaches transition from vanilla to modded generation where the palm trees are near the center:

As for loading a world in a newer version, while older versions of TMCW did not add any new blocks or items (besides variations of existing ones, such as the new stones) this isn't the case anymore; I'm not sure what they would do but versions since 1.8 are very picky about even blocks and items with invalid data values/states, such as the new types of flowers, which I based on dandelions while 1.7+ based them on roses. Here is what happened when I loaded a copy of a world created in TMCWv4 in vanilla 1.6.4; a chunk of my base disappeared. Biome colors and precipitation will also become messed up since their biome IDs do not match (for example, Tropical Swamp has biome ID 30, which is Cold Taiga in 1.7; even vanilla has the issue that what was once snowy taiga in 1.6.4 is now snow-free).

Even separate versions of TMCW aren't guaranteed to update without issues; the upcoming TMCWv5 release will even change some vanilla blocks, such as removing the red mushroom block and making them a variant of brown mushrooms with the now-unused block ID used by red sandstone (this means that if opened in vanilla the new Badlands biome will turn into red mushrooms underground, which will all break soon as one updates. Another block I removed is locked chests (a legacy April Fool's addition with no practical use), which are now underwater grass and sea grass, while in 1.7+ they are stained glass. Other biomes also use new blocks which will likewise cause them to even entirely disappear down to bedrock if loaded in vanilla; later vanilla versions will cause them to turn into various blocks; likewise, somebody once told me they found a minecart with command block, which meant that they opened a world in 1.7+, where they use the same ID as amethyst).

In superflat, I saw about something about dungeons with a count in the upcoming TMCWv5. Is this the same as customized?

Yes, except the count is effectively double that in 1.8's Customized because they only generate up to y=127 (since 1.7 dungeons are effectively rarer because they doubled their range from 0-127 to 0-255; there isn't any use of increasing it since caves pretty much don't generate higher up and dungeons can't generate without them, or rarely in the sides of cliffs). This does mean that the maximum count that I set, 800, is equivalent to 1600 (the default of 8 is equivalent to 16, which I've suggested when using my "old caves" mods).

I've also added control of some other things, such as whether snow is generated (in vanilla you have to wait for it to snow) and whether passive mobs spawn during world generation (in vanilla they only randomly spawn after the world is generated, in very low numbers compared to normal worlds due to the mob cap), and whether certain biomes, like desert and mesa, replace stone with biome-specific blocks (sandstone, hardened clay, etc. This currently always occurs in TMCWv4 if "decoration" is enabled); I use the same code to generate Superflat worlds as normal worlds, except for the terrain generation step (TMCWv4 and earlier versions used the vanilla Superflat generator so not all features would generate, or not generate properly).

Is there a way to include mesa mineshafts and custom dungeon counter (superflat) to TMCWv4? Just curious.

I've made so many changes to TMCWv5 that it would be like copying something from 1.6.4 to 1.13 or vice-versa; world generation is entirely different (not necessarily the way it looks but the underlying code).

Also, as for TMCWv5, I could add a link to a zip file containing a changelog and updates until I finish it, since the URL will remain the same as long as I use the same name for the files (the only potential issue is if the URL ever changes for any reason; I just checked to make sure and the link for the first version, posted 5 years ago, still works). Otherwise, I have no idea where I might post future updates, including for TMCWv5 (notices of potential bug fixes and minor changes and additions; for example, I last updated TMCWv4 last December to fix a bug with mineshafts and strongholds, which you notified me about, as well as added my personal "resource pack" and a custom skin resource pack. I also plan to make a version of MCMap that can properly render the new blocks added in TMCWv5, which will likely be included after the main release).

This probably won't happen, given how much more I want to add (I hadn't spent much time on it in recent months, instead playing on another world, but I'd been including more things to add as I come up with them - the list of things to do is around 100 items long, about a third of everything added so far, where I've probably spent 6 months exclusively working on it instead of playing). Some of them have already been implemented in a separate mod (a modified version of Optifine, which cannot be distributed; I've been considering dropping support for it entirely as many of the changes I've made improve performance more than it does and this would allow me to add in my own settings in place of the ones Optifine added, which are broken because I've overridden its code (Optifine itself also has a bug where it only increases the server view distance above 10 if the render distance is 17 or more. The minimum can also be lowered to 8 with TMCW due to changes to mob (de)spawning); currently I still recommend it for its optimizations and Clear Water, which now only changes the underwater fog as I changed the light opacity of water to be the same as Clear Water, or vanilla 1.13+):

Complete darkness at a light level of 0 (higher levels are also darker, with the effect diminishing at higher levels so level 15 is unchanged):

The red areas are completely black, rgb(0,0,0), in the image above and will never have anything visible regardless of brightness or monitor settings (this was on Bright; the brightness setting now has no effect on either the minimum or maximum brightness, only the gamma curve between them. For comparison, in vanilla total "darkness" on Moody is still 5% brightness):

Smooth lighting fixes (vanilla has a blocky appearance around corners which is most noticeable in staircases like this; see MC-43968):

In this case, the shadows around blocks are skewed in vanilla (MC-138211):

Smooth lighting added to more blocks, including water (a feature exclusive to Bedrock Edition; the performance impact of my implementation is less than smooth lighting on normal blocks in vanilla so I don't know why they haven't added it to Java):

(only the center block is lit; all light-emitting blocks in vanilla do not have smooth lighting, which I've only omitted form blocks with a light level of 14 or more)

Lava and glowstone also always visually render with a light level of 15, so even if a black lighting glitch occurs they will always be visibly lit (light glitches should be much less common, and can be fixed by pressing F4, which will force a relight of loaded chunks).

This is an example of the performance at 20 chunk render distance and maximum settings (with Optifine); even then, it uses less than 512 MB of memory (259/418 MB) and server tick time is only 4.3 ms (50 max); generating a new world took only 3 seconds. Note also that the "vignette" effect was removed from Fancy (one reason I've never used Fancy is because of the darkening around the edges of the screen). Also, Fancy clouds now render faster than Fast clouds in vanilla, and Fancy leaves render 4 times faster with smooth lighting enabled (I removed it from interior faces, with their shading adjusted to give a similar appearance to the darkening from smooth lighting. Note that smooth lighting doesn't actually affect FPS unless chunks are being rendered/updated since the GPU is doing the same stuff, it just changes the brightness levels of each vertex, which are being set in any case). The rendering speed of many other things, from items to text, have also been substantially increased, by a factor of 10 or more in cases (Optifine doesn't affect any of this, only how chunks are rendered overall):

This shows how fast world generation is - it took only 3 seconds to generate a new world (it will be slower if it happens to be in a biome with big trees or mountains, but even those are several times faster than before, largely due to optimizations to the lighting engine, which took the majority of the time. Cave generation is also about 3 times faster due to using an improved RNG, which also means that every seed is different, unlike before or vanilla, where there are only 2^48 configurations of caves out of 2^64 seeds):

Some other improvements; ladders now render their back side, making them visible from behind, and can be placed on more blocks, including glass, and are placed more consistently (only on the block you are pointing at, avoiding ladders being placed elsewhere if the block you are pointing at isn't a valid location):

Water/lava buckets were fixed to prevent "ghost" buckets (appearing to be filled/empty when they aren't) and placed liquid sources (caused by the client and server running the same code, but not exactly in sync).

Biome colors are smoothed over a larger area, while still being less resource intensive than vanilla since I read directly from the stored data in a chunk (the client isn't allowed to access the biome generator, which has caused issues, even crashes, in vanilla):

There's also many more bugfixes; for example, I've occasionally noticed that the player's POV jumps after exiting a GUI, which seems to have become worse with an update, which I was able to completely fix with a simple change to the class the game uses to record mouse movement:

// Fixes a bug where mouse movement in a GUI screen changes the player's POV in-game
// after closing the GUI by the relative movement inside it.
public class MouseHelperFix extends MouseHelper

It should also be noted that I've made more changes that nerf mob farms; for example, mob spawning only spawns mobs in 25% of chunks per spawn cycle, making it 4 times slower per chunk, with the frequency of passive mob spawn cycles doubled (one ever 10 seconds, twice as slow per chunk. For hostile mobs this is still more than enough to keep the mob cap full when flying around and I saw no effect when I tested it in a world I was playing on; this change also significantly reduces the tick time). Mobs that drop resource items, like iron golems and zombie pigmen, also only do so if the player kills them (there really isn't any reason for most mobs to drop anything unless the player kills them, but I did not change most drops). Mobs also can never spawn above the Nether ceiling (the range is fixed to y=1-125), which is also forbidden to players in Survival mode (you'll take damage similar to being in the void).

There is one change that is an advantage though; the actual height in a column is used instead of the "lc" value (a change made in vanilla in 1.8), which included empty chunk sections so if you ever loaded the topmost section (y=240-255) it would permanently affect spawn rates (the game never deletes sections once they have been loaded; certain lighting glitches occurred due to the server not sending them to the client, which I fixed). This also slightly increases natural spawn rates (e.g. a flat surface at y=65 (ground at y=64) would previously use an lc value of 64 + 16 = 80, now it is 65. Similarly, a deep ravine like this would see a much higher spawn rate at the bottom, without having to be wide enough to have whole empty sections inside).

Also, you can preview the underground of TMCWv5 with the following utility, which is a basic Java app which shows the locations of caves, mineshafts, and strongholds, including the ability to generate maps of the area, not including strongholds yet (the version for TMCWv4 only printed out locations, and only centered around the origin. A good way to find things is to first run it with a large radius and no "map #" option, then make maps of the areas of interest using a smaller radius (maps are limited to 4096x4096 pixels/blocks, or 2048x2048 blocks when a scale of 2:1 is used):

Note that you can use this without having to install Java if you change the path to point to the runtime the launcher downloads (see the "help" file, the launcher will also show the path to the Java executable, which should be changed to java.exe instead of javaw.exe).

Here are some examples:

A 1:1 rendering (50% of original size) of a 3072x3072 block area centered around 0,0 in the seed "12345"; green areas have air at sea level (y=62) and are potentially exposed (this is based on the color scheme that Unmined uses, including the way changes in elevation are displayed):

A 2:1 rendering (full size) of an 800x800 block area including the giant cave region furthest to the east above near the top-left, with a network cave region near the lower-right and a giant cave near the top-right:

The same area, but with the altitude limited to y=13 (equivalent to y=20 in vanilla, a good layer to find denser cave systems; you can also see the variation of caves better):

This was the largest cave found within 8192 blocks of the origin (1 million chunks), with a volume of 680,000 air blocks; compared to TMCWv4 the maximum size of caves and ravines is considerably larger. To put the size of this cave into perspective, it is equivalent to all the caves and ravines in about 970 chunks in 1.6.4 and 1160 chunks in 1.7+ (the area shown is 384x384 blocks or 24x24 chunks, so the single large cave has twice the average volume of a 1.7+ world over the whole area. Even then, a giant cave region is even larger, averaging about 1.25 million air blocks):

The largest ravine, with a volume of 516,000; I didn't check in an actual world but it probably does go from the surface all the way down to lava level :
(a depth of 59 for a ravine means that it goes from y=4-62, the number of layers between lava level and sea level, and the maximum depth shown).

The largest circular room, with a volume of 84,000; these are relatively small compared to other caves, in part because they are much less varied in shape (circular rooms are a single semi-spherical cave segment with half the usual width-height ratio. I haven't added them yet but a discussion in this thread game me the idea to add variants based on generating ravines or other caves in a 360 degree pattern):

The largest mineshaft, with 408 structure pieces (a 1-4 support long section of corridor, crossing, staircase, or the central room), which makes it about 40 times larger than the smallest mineshafts and 4 times larger than average (a very small mineshaft can be seen in the upper-right corner of the previous image. Vanilla can rarely generate mineshafts with only the central room, but I fixed that a long time ago):

This probably won't happen, given how much more I want to add (I hadn't spent much time on it in recent months, instead playing on another world, but I'd been including more things to add as I come up with them - the list of things to do is around 100 items long, about a third of everything added so far, where I've probably spent 6 months exclusively working on it instead of playing). Some of them have already been implemented in a separate mod (a modified version of Optifine, which cannot be distributed; I've been considering dropping support for it entirely as many of the changes I've made improve performance more than it does and this would allow me to add in my own settings in place of the ones Optifine added, which are broken because I've overridden its code (Optifine itself also has a bug where it only increases the server view distance above 10 if the render distance is 17 or more. The minimum can also be lowered to 8 with TMCW due to changes to mob (de)spawning); currently I still recommend it for its optimizations and Clear Water, which now only changes the underwater fog as I changed the light opacity of water to be the same as Clear Water, or vanilla 1.13+):

Complete darkness at a light level of 0 (higher levels are also darker, with the effect diminishing at higher levels so level 15 is unchanged):

The red areas are completely black, rgb(0,0,0), in the image above and will never have anything visible regardless of brightness or monitor settings (this was on Bright; the brightness setting now has no effect on either the minimum or maximum brightness, only the gamma curve between them. For comparison, in vanilla total "darkness" on Moody is still 5% brightness):

Smooth lighting fixes (vanilla has a blocky appearance around corners which is most noticeable in staircases like this; see MC-43968):

In this case, the shadows around blocks are skewed in vanilla (MC-138211):

Smooth lighting added to more blocks, including water (a feature exclusive to Bedrock Edition; the performance impact of my implementation is less than smooth lighting on normal blocks in vanilla so I don't know why they haven't added it to Java):

(only the center block is lit; all light-emitting blocks in vanilla do not have smooth lighting, which I've only omitted form blocks with a light level of 14 or more)

Lava and glowstone also always visually render with a light level of 15, so even if a black lighting glitch occurs they will always be visibly lit (light glitches should be much less common, and can be fixed by pressing F4, which will force a relight of loaded chunks).

This is an example of the performance at 20 chunk render distance and maximum settings (with Optifine); even then, it uses less than 512 MB of memory (259/418 MB) and server tick time is only 4.3 ms (50 max); generating a new world took only 3 seconds. Note also that the "vignette" effect was removed from Fancy (one reason I've never used Fancy is because of the darkening around the edges of the screen). Also, Fancy clouds now render faster than Fast clouds in vanilla, and Fancy leaves render 4 times faster with smooth lighting enabled (I removed it from interior faces, with their shading adjusted to give a similar appearance to the darkening from smooth lighting. Note that smooth lighting doesn't actually affect FPS unless chunks are being rendered/updated since the GPU is doing the same stuff, it just changes the brightness levels of each vertex, which are being set in any case). The rendering speed of many other things, from items to text, have also been substantially increased, by a factor of 10 or more in cases (Optifine doesn't affect any of this, only how chunks are rendered overall):

This shows how fast world generation is - it took only 3 seconds to generate a new world (it will be slower if it happens to be in a biome with big trees or mountains, but even those are several times faster than before, largely due to optimizations to the lighting engine, which took the majority of the time. Cave generation is also about 3 times faster due to using an improved RNG, which also means that every seed is different, unlike before or vanilla, where there are only 2^48 configurations of caves out of 2^64 seeds):

Some other performance comparisons:

Some other improvements; ladders now render their back side, making them visible from behind, and can be placed on more blocks, including glass, and are placed more consistently (only on the block you are pointing at, avoiding ladders being placed elsewhere if the block you are pointing at isn't a valid location):

Water/lava buckets were fixed to prevent "ghost" buckets (appearing to be filled/empty when they aren't) and placed liquid sources (caused by the client and server running the same code, but not exactly in sync).

Biome colors are smoothed over a larger area, while still being less resource intensive than vanilla since I read directly from the stored data in a chunk (the client isn't allowed to access the biome generator, which has caused issues, even crashes, in vanilla):

There's also many more bugfixes; for example, I've occasionally noticed that the player's POV jumps after exiting a GUI, which seems to have become worse with an update, which I was able to completely fix with a simple change to the class the game uses to record mouse movement:

// Fixes a bug where mouse movement in a GUI screen changes the player's POV in-game
// after closing the GUI by the relative movement inside it.
public class MouseHelperFix extends MouseHelper

It should also be noted that I've made more changes that nerf mob farms; for example, mob spawning only spawns mobs in 25% of chunks per spawn cycle, making it 4 times slower per chunk, with the frequency of passive mob spawn cycles doubled (one ever 10 seconds, twice as slow per chunk. For hostile mobs this is still more than enough to keep the mob cap full when flying around and I saw no effect when I tested it in a world I was playing on; this change also significantly reduces the tick time). Mobs that drop resource items, like iron golems and zombie pigmen, also only do so if the player kills them (there really isn't any reason for most mobs to drop anything unless the player kills them, but I did not change most drops). Mobs also can never spawn above the Nether ceiling (the range is fixed to y=1-125), which is also forbidden to players in Survival mode (you'll take damage similar to being in the void).

There is one change that is an advantage though; the actual height in a column is used instead of the "lc" value (a change made in vanilla in 1.8), which included empty chunk sections so if you ever loaded the topmost section (y=240-255) it would permanently affect spawn rates (the game never deletes sections once they have been loaded; certain lighting glitches occurred due to the server not sending them to the client, which I fixed). This also slightly increases natural spawn rates (e.g. a flat surface at y=65 (ground at y=64) would previously use an lc value of 64 + 16 = 80, now it is 65. Similarly, a deep ravine like this would see a much higher spawn rate at the bottom, without having to be wide enough to have whole empty sections inside).

Also, you can preview the underground of TMCWv5 with the following utility, which is a basic Java app which shows the locations of caves, mineshafts, and strongholds, including the ability to generate maps of the area, not including strongholds yet (the version for TMCWv4 only printed out locations, and only centered around the origin. A good way to find things is to first run it with a large radius and no "map #" option, then make maps of the areas of interest using a smaller radius (maps are limited to 4096x4096 pixels/blocks, or 2048x2048 blocks when a scale of 2:1 is used):

Note that you can use this without having to install Java if you change the path to point to the runtime the launcher downloads (see the "help" file, the launcher will also show the path to the Java executable, which should be changed to java.exe instead of javaw.exe).

Here are some examples:

A 1:1 rendering (50% of original size) of a 3072x3072 block area centered around 0,0 in the seed "12345"; green areas have air at sea level (y=62) and are potentially exposed (this is based on the color scheme that Unmined uses, including the way changes in elevation are displayed):

A 2:1 rendering (full size) of an 800x800 block area including the giant cave region furthest to the east above near the top-left, with a network cave region near the lower-right and a giant cave near the top-right:

The same area, but with the altitude limited to y=13 (equivalent to y=20 in vanilla, a good layer to find denser cave systems; you can also see the variation of caves better):

This was the largest cave found within 8192 blocks of the origin (1 million chunks), with a volume of 680,000 air blocks; compared to TMCWv4 the maximum size of caves and ravines is considerably larger. To put the size of this cave into perspective, it is equivalent to all the caves and ravines in about 970 chunks in 1.6.4 and 1160 chunks in 1.7+ (the area shown is 384x384 blocks or 24x24 chunks, so the single large cave has twice the average volume of a 1.7+ world over the whole area. Even then, a giant cave region is even larger, averaging about 1.25 million air blocks):

The largest ravine, with a volume of 516,000; I didn't check in an actual world but it probably does go from the surface all the way down to lava level :
(a depth of 59 for a ravine means that it goes from y=4-62, the number of layers between lava level and sea level, and the maximum depth shown).

The largest circular room, with a volume of 84,000; these are relatively small compared to other caves, in part because they are much less varied in shape (circular rooms are a single semi-spherical cave segment with half the usual width-height ratio. I haven't added them yet but a discussion in this thread game me the idea to add variants based on generating ravines or other caves in a 360 degree pattern):

The largest mineshaft, with 408 structure pieces (a 1-4 support long section of corridor, crossing, staircase, or the central room), which makes it about 40 times larger than the smallest mineshafts and 4 times larger than average (a very small mineshaft can be seen in the upper-right corner of the previous image. Vanilla can rarely generate mineshafts with only the central room, but I fixed that a long time ago):

World generation in general is completely different, the same applies to every other version (it is more like the difference between Minecraft 1.0, the current game, and a Minecraft 2.0, which would be a completely new game, rather than Minecraft 1.6 and Minecraft 1.7); this is mainly because I replaced Java's Random with my own superior RNG (every possible seed will generate a completely different world; in older versions/vanilla every seed was one of 65536 seeds which had the same cave generation and other features, as described here).

Even some block and item IDs will be different; for example, I combined red mushrooms (block ID 40) with brown mushrooms (39), with 40 now used by red sandstone. Diamond ender chests now have their own tile entity (previously they used the same one as ender chests, with the block ID telling them apart), flower pots are now tile entities, and empty spawners are a single block ID with the ID used by lit empty spawners now used by saguaro cactus (I added the ability for metadata to affect things like light level and opacity; vanilla has to use separate blocks for things like redstone ore).

A lot of this was done to conserve block IDs, of which there are still about 60 left, as well as simplify code; e.g. all types of wood fences are a single block ID so all code that checks for fence blocks only needs to need to check for a single block, avoiding the need to fix a lot of code, this is also why I originally made amethyst ore a variant of obsidian (it was previously its own block) so I didn't have to change the pickaxe code to give it the mining level of obsidian.

*Here is a list of all the biomes, blocks, items and other things I've added so far (including in previous versions); the mod has reached the point where there should be some sort of Wiki or similar to describe everything (for example, Biomes O' Plenty has a Wiki):